


Tragedy, Comedy, History, Pastoral

by Querulousgawks



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drugs, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Mental Illness, Season/Series 01 Spoilers, references to rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 09:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4217259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Veronica never makes it to Shelley's party, but the drugs still do. Duncan and Madison get roofied and have a conversation.</p><p><em>Logan is watching him intently, half smug and half anxious. Duncan has known him for ten years, he knows that look. It says </em>yes<em>. Yes there </em>are<em> fire ants in that counselor’s underwear drawer, yes I </em>have<em> fucked your sister in this airplane bathroom, yes you </em>did<em> just drink the same thing Dick gave Madison.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Tragedy, Comedy, History, Pastoral

**Author's Note:**

> This was patiently and insightfully beta'ed by MimiLaRue, who doesn't even like these people and was amazing anyway. All mistakes are my own.  
> The title is from Tom Stoppard's _Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead._

Duncan grabs the cup and drinks half in one swallow, feeling at once fuzzier and brighter than he had all night. He hates rum, isn't used to it, maybe that’s why, except - Logan is watching him intently, half smug and half anxious. Duncan has known him for ten years, he knows that look. It says _yes_. Yes there _are_ fire ants in that counselor’s underwear drawer, yes I _did_ fuck your sister in this airplane bathroom, yes you _did_ just drink the same thing Dick gave Madison. He might roll out reasons - that guy called you a blimp, she was wearing that dress, you are boring as fuck these days - but the look is the real defense. _You love me, don’t you?_

Those assholes definitely came back from Tijuana with whatever he just drank. _True friends,_ he thinks fleetingly of one of Lilly’s lines _, always stabbing you in the front._ But the memory of Veronica turned away by a wall of cold shoulders at the door tonight churns like acid in his gut, and he gets no comfort from the conclusion. He and Logan wouldn't know a true friend if one actually did come up and stab ‘em in the front.

 _Fuck it._ He takes the last burning swallow and aims the cup at the hedges, where it catches neatly on an unpruned branch. A natural, Woody had said at little league tryouts, running a hand along his already broad shoulders. You've got the build for the big leagues, kiddo. Duncan had gone home and asked to switch to soccer. His dad had objected with his usual mild persistence: Kanes didn't quit, and baseball would be good for the whole family- soccer wasn't very American, was it? Lilly had gotten him out of it, though, like she always did when it counted.

Thinking about Lilly makes it time to go home; can’t have an episode in front of so many witnesses. (Jake Kane had crouched down with a tired smile and the world on his shoulders, a promise that was really a plea: Listen, son, no one ever has to know. Duncan had tucked his bloody knuckles into his pockets and nodded hard, asked no questions about the dents in the wall.)

Now he digs his keys out and spins them, wondering with a strange, muted distance how much Liquid X on top of his daily meds would screw up his driving skills. Then again, would a car crash _really_ be worse than weeping drunkenly into Shelly Pomeroy’s lounge furniture? They should put together a chart for these things. Logan would know, but Logan has turned away – girls are laughing in the hot tub, and the patio is briefly empty, which seems like enough reason to take a shortcut to the street through the hedge.

It’s not enough reason. Hedges are terrible shortcuts. Duncan pitches out onto the sidewalk, shaking leaves from his hair, and catches himself against the nearest car. It turns out to be his, but he hesitates. Driving is starting to seem like a worse decision every minute – what if he hits a hedge? He squints accusingly at the one he just wrestled his way through. That thing could probably crumple the whole front end.

Also, there’s a funny hissing noise coming from the passenger side of the car.

“Duncan?” The noise stops as he comes unsteadily around the hood, only to find Madison Sinclair staring at him with an aerosol can in her hand. They blink at each other for a minute. He thinks briefly that it’s nice to see someone as confused as he is, but then her eyes widen in sudden awareness and she jerks her head sideways to look at the car.

“This is… your car,” she says slowly.

He nods, following her gaze, and frowns at the letters on the window. “I’m not a slut.”  The old movie-reel flashes by in his mind - Veronica leaning against his locker, collapsed with laughter on Lilly’s bed, cuddling into him in the limo - and he tries to shake off the inevitable sick chills. Whatever he is, is _worse_ , probably, but he isn’t thinking about that right now. Just the mystery in front of him.

Madison looks dolefully at the can in her hand, then back at him. “I meant to do Dick’s.” She shakes her head a little like she’s trying to come alert, and adds, “Dick’s _car._ ”

“But this is _my_ car.”

Madison gives a tight, irritated shrug, just like she had earlier, when – “Rum and coke!” He points at her triumphantly, the light in his brain finally flickering on.

He gets a Madison Sinclair eyeroll, but after a minute she nods, slides down the side of the car to sit propped against the wheel well, and tips her head back to confirm, “Rum, coke and roofie.”

He collapses beside her, the victory draining out of him. “Me too,” he says, and she looks at him hard.

“Logan?” she guesses, and he nods sheepishly, then lets his head loll forward, surprised at how heavy it feels. Even Madison’s too-loud snort and immediate flinch aren’t enough to make him look up, although he bets her expression is priceless. She must be feeling it, too. They’re quiet for a while.

"Logan." Madison says it again, musing, after what he’s pretty sure is only a few minutes. “Why do you even…?” She trails off and Duncan finishes in his head: _fall for it, put up with it, keep following him around like nothing in your lives has changed._  He shrugs.  _Conservation of energy,_ he thinks. It's the answer but it won't make any sense; they didn't get roofied with the right kind of drugs for that. He tries for regular words, instead.

"I'm the only one he's ever nice to, now. Can't waste it." 

Madison makes a little scoff in the back of her throat, and he can see muscles work under her jaw. He thinks she used to be rounder, there, a couple years ago, Lilly had too - hell, so had he, but it wasn't the same for guys. He had been a fat kid but then there was soccer and he wasn't anymore, an easy enough switch. Girls like Madison needed to scour every trace of softness and keep it gone, if they were gonna care at all. It seemed like a lot of work.  

Madison makes that noise again, more questioning now, and he wonders how long he's been silent. His brain hasn't felt like this since he was ten and the doctors doubled his Elextra twice in a month. He still has enough of a filter not to voice what he's been thinking, though, digs for something else: 

"That's such a cat sound. You seem like a cat person." Right, not much filter after all, then, but Madison's noise in response sounds so much like a stepped-on tail he can't help snickering. She sucks in air, enraged, and he swallows the laugh with a gulp. 

"They shed on your clothes and shit in gravel. No." Her tone is icily formal, the way she does when Dick is living down to his name, and she is pretending to be above it. Duncan scrunches up a little in guilt; he's not used to hurting people with _words,_ without knowing it.

A lot of qualifiers, there. 

Casting around for a distraction, he realizes what her earlier question must mean. “You knew about the drugs? When you drank it?” Her stiff curtain of hair swings forward as she nods, and she flicks it back, fussily avoiding contact with the car. “Then why did you…” Duncan trails off. He’s not even sure why he’s asking.

But Madison just looks at him, pursing her lips –still pissed – and the pause makes him curious. “I told _you_ ,” he prods, and she rolls her eyes.

“Sugar,” she says finally, with an exaggerated longing like she’s trying to make fun of herself, but her voice catches as she adds, “I could smell it,” and he definitely doesn’t know what to say to that. Raw need, even if it was just directed towards soda, was always the Kane cue to cut out, so he is shifting away when she finishes matter-of-factly, “and it’s not like Dick would stop, anyway. It’s easier if I’m out of it.”  

The Kanes – the remaining Kanes - would run from that for sure, the frank expression of something they pretty much already knew. The weirdness of the situation is suddenly crushing, and he searches for the most distancing – most appropriate – “It was probably corn syrup,” is what comes out of his mouth and _Jesus_ , he is letting the dynasty down here. Madison laughs, though, startled and brittle.

“Not at the Pomeroys,” and her normal voice is back, fussy know-it-all trashing their friends and he hopes it’s just the drugs making him hear the hunger in it. “It’s the Mexican Coke, or Jewish-holiday, whatever. Belgian, maybe. It’s the kind with real sugar, I can tell.”

He shouldn’t have asked. He’s not the kind of person who knows what other people are hiding and he is absolutely okay with that. It’s like the line Lilly and Logan used to trade each other, he has _one job, Kane._ He has a secret to keep, he wrecked everything to keep it, and he can’t go screwing that up by carrying anyone else’s. He should leave.

“It shouldn’t have to be like that,” he mumbles instead, knowing he sounds like a child but needing to say it anyway. He means it about more than Madison shrugging away from Dick’s hands and going hungry for that angle in her jaw, more than everyone in his life drugging him into a person they might actually want around. There’s a way the world should be, and whenever something burns off the fog of Lilly’s death – damn Logan anyway – he finds himself scrabbling for that rightness and gets this instead. This, this sideshow, this shadow, this sham.

He is _drunk._

He is still not drunk enough to say any of this to Madison Sinclair.

So he goes for the old joke, feeling the awkwardness of a straight man clowning. “When I’m in charge, it won’t be like that.”

Her arm comes up, slowly, to pat him on the leg and maybe she checks it first to find a clean spot, but that’s Madison.  

“You don’t have to be in charge of anything, Duncan.”

***

He remembers it - falling asleep to the class bitch patting his knee and waking up to the curve of the wheel well imprinted on his cheek – much later, when he surfaces from the prescription haze long enough to realize Logan and Madison are running him for class president. Like a prize – steer, sheep, whatever gets run, he doesn’t know. The image of them as two very different kinds of herding dog is the only funny thing about it. “You said I didn’t have to,” he snaps at Madison, once. Just for a second, her face gets the startled stillness he only ever saw that night.

Her scowl rushes to cover though, and she says, “Wanda _Varner_ , Duncan,” like it’s an argument in itself. He signs the paperwork, wondering if the path of least resistance actually will take him all the way to the White House, and she gives him her 09er smile.  


End file.
